returned. Over 103,086 more were deported in 2013. Many of the deportees complained of torture and other abuses by Iranian authorities. In October 2020 there were 780,000 registered citizens of Afghanistan residing in Iran. Most of these were born and raised in Iran during the last four decades. In 2015, Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli stated that 2.5 million Afghans resided in Iran, which includes the registered and illegals as well as those who were admitted to the country with Afghan passports and Iranian visas. Over 600,000 Afghans living in Iran have returned to Afghanistan in 2022. Afghanistan's Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation has acknowledged that approximately 3 million Afghan citizens still remain in Iran as of January 2023. Social and legal issues Afghan refugees have come to Iran since the 1980s, including children and adolescents. Many were born in Iran over the last 30 years but were unable to gain citizenship due to Iranian immigration laws. The refugees include Hazaras, Tajiks, Qizilbash, Pashtuns, and other ethnic groups of Afghanistan. One UNHCR paper claims that nearly half the documented refugees are Hazara, a primarily Shi'a group. In Afghanistan, some people feel that using birth control violates the tenets of their religion; however, in Iran, attitudes are far different, due to the country's extensive promotion of family planning. Afghans in Iran have moved closer to mainstream Iranian values in this regard; the Iranian influence has even filtered back into Afghanistan. One study in Khorasan has found that while overall fertility rates for Afghan migrant women are somewhat higher than those for Iranian women there—3.9 vs. 3.6—the similarity hides significant age-related differences in fertility, with older Afghan migrant women having a far higher number of children than older Iranian urban women, while younger Afghan migrant women's number of children appears to be approaching the far-lower Iranian urban norm. Contraceptive usage among the same study group was 55%, higher than for local Iranian women. More broadly, the same conservative men who resisted aggressive attempts by communist governments in Afghanistan to expand women's education and their role in the economy are now faced with the very changes from which they had hoped to shield their families. This shift in family and gender roles was induced by the experience of living as refugees in largely Muslim society. Some Afghan men married Iranian women during their residence in Iran; however, under Iranian nationality law, the children of such